My beloved wife died a bit more than six months ago, and I still can’t orient myself to a life that’s mine alone. Like a fish that remains unaware of the water it’s always lived in, I lived a life that was always about “we.” What happened to us? What will we do for vacation? What a good time we had!
Now I am alone again, washed up on the shore. Death has pulled her away from me, abandoning me to a life of utterly empty freedom.
I don’t want to live free. I want to to be bound to her all over again. My true life began when I met her, and now that she’s died I feel I am nothing.
Saint John Paul II taught that the sacrament of marriage, when held to its ideal, opens us up to an earthly experience of God’s loving power. When two lovers finally and irrevocably cast their lot with each other, and love each other with complete abandon, they gain the privilege of becoming the channel through which God creates a new human soul. The love of each spouse for the other, and their joint love for their children, is the closest avenue we have in this life to God’s infinite love.
That has been my experience.
I’m grateful that in our last years together I frequently reflected on our mortality. When I used to leave for work in the early morning, I would look at her before I closed the bedroom door behind me, and I’d utter a silent plea to God for one more day with her. I knew that none of us can be certain of even one more breath, let alone another day.
What I’ve learned in the months since her death was how much I missed just the everyday, routine presence of her in my life. Her smile; that first kiss when we woke up in the morning; holding her hand; talking about our children, knowing we felt the same helpless love for them, and that we shared the same fear of how life might harm them.
She’s gone now. She’s left me, and as I look back on our lives together, as I look at pictures of our honeymoon, our children’s birth, and all their birthdays, it all seems unreal, like it was a long, totally immersive dream.
Once again I’m the person I was before I met her. Once again, I have no one special person to care for. No one needs me in that way. She knew the story of me, and she loved me anyway. During our long years together, we learned who we really are. We learned the dreams we each had, and we saw the hard realities of our limitations. We learned the lies we each told ourselves, and we loved each other enough to let those gentle lies live.
She was the kindest person I’ve ever met, and the most caring. People tell me that grieving can go on for years, and I still feel an intense, piercing stab of pain when I climb into bed at night, knowing she’ll never be there again. I’d give anything for just a few more moments filled with the simple, unthinking acts we did for each other: the meals she cooked for me; the coffee I’d bring her in bed each morning; sharing afternoon cocktails while we sat on the porch; opening the car door for her. There were many times I’d think of her on the way home from work, or while I was running some errands, and I’d stop and buy her flowers. Such happiness to walk in the door, and hand them too her as a sign of my love!
She frequently kept journals, and I’ve started to read them. It’s remarkable how few surprises I’ve found. I knew of her unfulfilled wishes, her doubts, her disappointments in life. I already knew that there were times when I hurt her. But I have found great reassurance that she explicitly wrote how blessed she felt in her life, and that she appreciated me, and the life we made together.
Because of COVID, she died alone. Our contact was limited to a few phone calls each day. I’m grateful our children and I were able to visit her one final time as she slipped away. In the hope that she could hear me, I told her how glad I was that she was my wife, and what a good mother she was. I told her she was the best thing that ever happened to me. My last words to her were that we’d meet again in God’s embrace.
